I'm new here, so if this has been flogged to death before, please point me to the previous discussion.

It's my understanding that, in Unicode, the $ symbol glyph may have one or two vertical bars - they're both graphic variants of the same. I wonder if it would be a better idea to separate them - I haven't seen this used currently, but an old convention ('70s) in dual-money budgets was to distinguish pesos and dollars by using $ with one bar for the former and $ with two bars for the latter (I'll have to dig up examples).

Ugh. This could get ugly. If you can find texts where they are used contrastively, then that would be a significant factor in encoding a separate double-bar dollar sign, but there is a lot of pre-existing data out there that just plain doesn't separate the two.

The supposed origin of the dollar sign was originally a 'U' and 'S' superimposed over each other, and many of the old, large, pre-1923 bills and silver/gold certificates will show U/S dollar signs. It might be an interesting research project to see how the two forms were used contrastively in the past, as well as more recently.

My feeling is that this one might just be ripe for a variation selector.

It wouldn't help if hard&fast evidence can be brought for contrasting use, but would help all cases where people don't want to leave the choice simply to the font designer.

For some symbols such choice of variant makes sense without at the same time throwing out an entire font. Why, for example, should I have to choose different appearance for digits by going to a different font?

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